It is summer in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, the season of days spent sprawled on the carpet with fans uselessly pushing around hot air. Everyone stays inside until the sun abates and then slowly people emerge on the streets, leaving the stuffy space of their apartments. Outside, all is vivid under the blaring sun. Even the road seems to glow a bright gray.
I do not know it yet, but today I will watch the slaughter of a sheep.
I am lying on the floor of the bedroom with the window open doing Russian grammar exercises, when my host brother comes to my door to tell me it is a holiday and we are going to the country to a relative’s house to celebrate. I have been invited to Kurman Ait, known also as Eid al-Adha, the sacrificial feast. I dress in a hurry, grab my camera, and rush down to the courtyard where a car waits for us. The sun shocks my eyes as I step outside, as if the sky were aiming a camera down at me, flashing its blinding bulb as it captures me in my incongruity. In blue jeans and a red t-shirt with my bleach-blonde hair growing out at the roots, I am dressed for the Fourth of July, not a sacred meal.
I find my host brother and mother in the small shop they run, something like a bodega operating out of a metal-sided storage unit plopped down in the apartment courtyard. They are filling bags with treats to bring to the hosts. I have tried many times to capture the shop and its wares on camera since it is where each member of my host family spends countless hours and days of their lives. Its centrality to their existence seems vital to understanding them, and I want to remember it in all its details. But the darkness of the shop comes up against my lack of skill, and every photograph comes out shadowy. The reality of it evades me. In my photos, the abundance falls under a gray pall.
If I was less shy, more brash, I would ask to photograph them as they sit at the register. I would have them stare into the lens and take multiple photos, yet I know they would grow timid and false under the pressure of my lens. The act of posing would make them self-conscious and thus corrupt the candor. Besides, I recognize the strangeness of this request to photograph the mundanity of their work lives, and so I do not ask.
I hold my camera, waiting for them to finish gathering supplies, and think about how foreign everything seems when you are the foreigner. A bag of chips is a novelty. The manner of making tea and of using the restroom seem remarkable. Even the light switches and outlets are miraculous in their configuration. When I first arrived, I photographed their stove against a pale, floral wallpaper. I find something extraordinary in the everyday details of others’ lives.
In the shop, they sell ice cream, fermented milks, and kurut, a salty, fermented yogurt ball that kids suck on all throughout the summer. Beer and soda are kept cool in standing refrigerators. Chocolate and nuts hang from racks. Paper products sit tucked away above the towering shelves. There are fruits in barrels and cigarettes by the register. They keep a ledger to track customer tabs; some people owe hundreds, according to the pages, but my host family chases none of them down. They just keep giving.
After we have filled several plastic bags with drinks and candies, we say goodbye to my host brother. He bemoans the work but settles in behind the register. He is twelve and is left to watch YouTube videos on his phone, manning the shop while we are gone for the day.
I am ushered into the backseat of a car where two other women already sit. One is another American, a girl I know from the State-Department-funded program that has paid for my presence in this country. The other is a Kyrgyz woman loosely related to my host. The path of their relation is confusing to me, both because of the language barrier and because of my American understanding of the word “relative,” which only includes the nuclear family and close extended family,and ends there. Here, family is expansive.
The Krygyz woman positions her six-year-old-son to stand between her legs, his body jostling with the road as we leave Bishkek and drive into the country. Four of us wedged in the back. My host mother sits up front, between the driver and one of her sisters, to whom she gave a kidney many years ago. This is how I learned the word for transplant, peresadka, and how I began to understand the meaning and depth of her giving.
Fruit stands line the roads of the capital city with watermelons stacked high under temporary shelters. We stop at a stand with green melons, huge and small, piled under an open tent. We tumble out of the car. I watch my host mother step out. She is a head and a half shorter than me and walks always with her hands behind her back, as if the world were a museum and she was wandering slowly through its halls taking in the paintings. She examines the melons, then points to a few. These are the good melons. It is an art to see what is inside a green rind—the juice content, texture, seeds. The meat of the thing, all hidden. But she knows how to pick them.
Her relative, the man who is driving the car, pays for the melons she has chosen and places them in the trunk. Then we carry on with our drive. I stare out the window or make faces at the young boy as he bounces with every bump in the road.
The drive from our apartment to the home where we will be celebrating takes around an hour. We pass through fields that look like anywhere back home in middle America to me. Fields of endless grain behind fencing. We pass into something like a village where cinderblock homes form the backdrop for kids playing in the street.
We pass out of the village and through more open fields. A few dogs are running around, looking well-fed and free. Then, at last, we arrive at the place where the feast will be held.
We pull into a long driveway toward a simple house where light seems to spill in from every angle and the wind blows lightly, revealing the rooms behind white, doily curtains. It is one of those places where openness is the defining feature. In front of the house is a large, drained pool with blue tiles falling to the concrete bottom. It has been sitting in disuse for years.
“This was a camp a long time ago,” the woman in the backseat explains, speaking Russian slowly so the other American and I can understand. “A Soviet camp. The grounds were used for Soviet youth, and after the fall of the USSR, our family purchased the land and now they farm and have a home on it.” She tells us this as she rubs something off the boy’s face and adjusts him into her lap, readying him to exit the vehicle.
Grass grows through the road that forms the driveway and all over the property plants burst from the cement sidewalks that crisscross the acreage—paths where Soviet Youth Pioneers had once skipped toward summer activities. This was before the Soviet Union collapsed and Kyrgyzstan declared its independence in 1991. The past must crumble, and history must be repurposed.
When we get out of the car, I meet the matriarch of the family, a woman who wears a scarf wrapped around her head and a long, purple-patterned dress with a vest open on top. She wears a few golden bracelets, and earrings dangle from her age-stretched lobes. In her cheeks—plump, smooth, and high—I see the echoes of the face of my host mother. It is a face I know well after weeks of watching it over steaming cups of afternoon tea. With the matriarch, comes a whole party of people to welcome us. They are the daughters of the matriarch, sisters who talk as my sister and I do, as I hope sisters do the world over: in a ceaseless, chattering, jovial way. The women prepare the table and the men and their sons will soon complete the sacrifice.
“How old do you think she is?” the sisters all ask me, holding the matriarch’s hand and presenting her to me as if the guessing of her age were a challenge on a game show.
I know the right thing to do in this situation is to under-estimate. “Not a day over sixty,” I say.
“99!” they tell me, proud. I think of what a mother’s age means to her children. Watching a parent grow older is a chance to see one’s future.
Each of them goes through the same routine, asking me if I can believe how old she is, really. I say, “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it with a face as young as that.”
The matriarch and I look at each other kindly as this is all we can do. I nod in what I think is a manner that conveys respect. There is no hope for communication—she speaks only Kyrgyz, a language I have studied only enough to say “hello” and “thank you.” Kyrgyz is a Turkic language—the historic language of the Kyrgyz people—but after years of Russian then Soviet occupation, most people in the capital city speak Russian fluently. It has become the language of business, the language of shopping, the language of global connection.
But the matriarch is of another generation and from a rural area. She was raised in a yurt before the Soviets’ urbanizing and industrializing mission changed the landscape of the country and drastically altered the Kyrgyz way of life. When the Soviets were in power, they established Russian-speaking schools throughout the country which promoted literacy while simultaneously supplanting Kyrgyz with Russian.
It is as hard now to picture Kyrgyzstan before the Russians as it is to picture Oklahoma, the place I grew up, before the arrival of Europeans on the continent. “Every empire […] tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires,” wrote Edward Said, “that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” So it is that the foreignness of this country is made more comprehensible to me by the echoes of colonialism and occupation in my own country. Power always leaves the same marks behind.
Despite this familiarity, between the matriarch and myself lies a nearly impassable chasm of age, culture, and language. I follow her and a few other women to the back porch. A tapchan—a sort of large bed covered in a traditional carpet that functions as a table and seating area—has already been set with delicacies. Upon it are a bowl of vivid orange apricots and apples, a large glass serving dish of wine-colored jam, several plates of fresh cucumbers and ripe, red tomatoes, a tray of baklava, a large teapot, several cups, and one small plate set with several slices of sausage and cold cuts. Some are fatty cuts of horsemeat.
We make our way onto the tapchan. We settle in. I do this not very gracefully. There is a practiced way in which the women sit on the tapchan, with their knees folded easily beneath them. I find I cannot place my knees as they do and they laugh kindly at me, saying I sit like a man.
“Your legs are long. We are all very short,” one of the sisters says, and they all laugh.
They give me permission to sit like a man—an allowance on the basis of my height and American inflexibility. We laugh some more and make small talk. They ask the American girl and myself why we have come all the way to Kyrgyzstan. We tell her we are here to learn. We say what we always do when people ask what we think of their country: Vasha strana prekrasna i vy ochen’ gostepriimnyy, “Your country is beautiful and you are very hospitable.” We have been told in many orientation meetings and lectures that the Kyrgyz people are known for their hospitality. I feel odd now, telling them that the thing I have learned about them and their people is that they are very good at making accommodations. To compliment and define them only in terms of how they relate to outsiders feels like a disservice. I say, Thank you so much for having us, as many times as I can. Thank you for the meat. Thank you for the jam. Thank you for welcoming me.
The conversation slowly drifts away from Russian to Kyrgyz, the language more familiar to the generation seated at the table, who are mostly the daughters of the matriarch, women in their mid-to-late-fifties. The other American girl starts complaining quietly in English to me about how she doesn’t understand anything they are saying. I try to seem distracted by the slices of horse meat and by spooning jam into my tea.
I remember how, as a child, I would go to Synagogue with my mother, and when it was time to go, she would linger speaking to the other adults about things I couldn’t understand, and how I would tug at her arm, telling her, “It’s time to go home now,” because it was so hard to know how she could speak about things I couldn’t understand, and harder still to know she spoke to other people about things that were not me.
The U.S. government has paid for us to be here to study Russian, not Kyrgyz. The U.S. government considers Russian to be a “Critical Language,” for its difficulty and the correspondingly few number of American speakers, and for its importance in terms of—the scholarship website explains—“national security, economic prosperity, and engagement with the world.” Accordingly, a good number of the Americans I am here with hope to go into foreign service jobs or foreign policy. The girl I am sitting with will be starting a graduate program in International Politics in Germany come fall.
I am here as a writer with a camera around my neck. I told the government when I applied for this funding that I am interested in “cultural exchange”—the sort of broad and innocuous language which says nothing while hinting at something paradoxically both well-meaning and vulture-like. I aim my camera at the food and take pictures.
“I wish they would speak Russian,” the other American girl says again, hoping that if she reiterates her complaint, I will share it.
I say, “They are with family. It’s nice of them to have invited us.”
I do not want to isolate her in an already isolating experience, but I also want to prove somehow, both to myself and to my hosts, that I am a Good American—that just as they are good hosts, I am a good guest.
The boy who we rode with in the car is kicking a ball around, looking lonely since the other boys, his cousins, are much older. “I’m going to play with him,” I say, and rise awkwardly from the tapchan. He and I begin to kick the ball around near the empty pool. It is a nearly flat soccer ball. We pass it back and forth. He speaks a bit of Russian, and I speak Russian like a six-year-old, so we make fast friends.
The day goes on like this. Tea on the tapchan, kicking the ball with the boy, wandering around taking photos, women coming and going, preparing more food. One of the sisters shows me to the barns. “These used to be the dorms for the Soviet youth camp,” she says. We walk inside and see sheep and horses and goats and cows lying where once there were bunk beds for Soviet youth. The floors are covered with hay, dirt, and animal droppings. I try to imagine each stall as it once was, with children’s backpacks sprung open and socks and underwear strewn haphazardly across the floor. In the unswept halls, where ropes now hang and feed bags slump against the walls, I picture the Soviet campers getting ready to do exercises in the yard. One of the sisters, the one who lives in the house, takes a bucket out and begins milking the cows one by one. She allows me to take a picture of her in the yard between two former dormitories, milking a cow into a white, metal pail. I listen to the sound of the forceful stream hitting the bottom of the pail with each gentle tug of the udder.
More children start screaming and playing. The other American complains of a migraine from the children’s shouts. I can tell she is genuinely uncomfortable, and yet her discomfort discomfits me, and then I feel bad for not being kinder and more sensitive to her experience. I want somehow to not be like her, and yet I am in many ways just like her. It is a cycle of disgust and sympathy which only serves to make me hate myself, so I return to the camera and to the ball and the boy—comforting myself with the distance of the lens or the game of pass.
Soon, we go back to the tapchan again to find a large group of men: the husbands. They say they are almost ready to cut the sheep. My host mother asks if I want to watch. I say yes and stand eagerly, perhaps too eagerly.
“She is going to take a photo of how we kill animals to show how strange we are to her American friends,” one of the sisters says. Everyone laughs, and I do too. She has said it in Russian, so I can understand. She could have said it in Kyrgyz. That she said it in Russian means—could mean—either or both that she wants me to be in on the joke and wants me to know she is afraid this is my intention in taking these pictures.
As I laugh, I say in my clumsy Russian, “No, no. It is not strange to kill animals. I think it is good to know where food comes from. Good to take to eat only the things that we know from where they came.” I speak awkwardly, my grammar falling apart as I stumble in my attempt to show that I am not who she thinks I am. But as I speak, I realize that I am not sure who it is she thinks I am, and moreover, as I speak, I become less and less sure of who it is I actually am.
“My brother he eats only fish that he catches himself,” I continue. “In my family we think this is good, not strange to know where food comes from.” Is it true about my family? It is true about my brother, but we tend to think it precious of him, his sometimes-veganism, his peculiar and inconsistent animal ethics. We buy most of our meat and food from Walmart. And though my dad grows fresh tomatoes and peppers most summers, I know this is not the American Way.
“I just want to see,” I say. They laugh kindly at my Russian and say, “Go ahead with the men.”
My host mother joins me. She puts her hands behind her back again, and walks beside me, telling me the story of Ibrahim, who dreamt of slaughtering his son, Ishmael, in proof of his faith in God. Ibrahim takes his son to do this, and just in the last moment of preparation for the sacrifice, God sends an angel down with a ram to offer in the place of his son as sacrifice.
“We have the same story in the Torah,” I tell her. “Only it is Abraham and Isaac.” She nods her head in interest. We share something, after all. A story of sacrifice and faith. An overlap in the violence of our Gods.
We are quiet as we watch one of the boys lead a fat-rumped sheep out to a tree where it will be cut. The boy and his father and uncle tie its feet together so that it cannot kick, and I take a picture of it as they lay it on the ground. But soon I stop photographing the scene and simply watch it struggle, knowing that there are things which are not meant to be captured. And oh, how it struggles.
The men hold it still, and it is not a graceful death. The cut on its neck releases blood in great waves. And one man keeps cutting, pulling the sheep’s head back to allow the knife through. It is a motion more like sawing than slicing. And the sheep brays and continues braying but eventually stops. And soon the knife has made it nearly all the way through the neck, and yet the sheep still kicks for a few moments, its blood dyeing the dirt a striking red—and how could it live still? Live through so much of the sacrifice. I do not want to cry but I am moved by the moment. I hold back my tears for I told my hosts that I wanted to watch, and that I would not find it strange. But suddenly I do find it strange. I find I cannot abide the spectacle. And the foreignness and force of the moment makes me temporarily forget my desire to be a good guest, a passive and unjudging visitor in this land. I forget my understanding of things like moral relativism and cultural diplomacy. I watch and think of God’s request to Abraham, and remember thinking once that, had I ever been a real believer, the story of Issac’s Binding would have sent me into a fit of doubt.
I think of the way the sheep moves beneath the knife. It is a striking image, the struggle of the sheep against its fate. The vision flashes before me even as I write this—its useless toiling against death and me standing there, watching. I see myself in the third person, not through my own eyes, but as a character posed as an onlooker, as part of the brutal mise-en-scene. There I am, my camera hanging from its strap around my neck, watching the ritual occur. I recall a line from a Joan Didion essay: “It was a peculiar moment, but so explicit as to suggest nothing beyond itself.”
I turn to my host mother, who still stands beside me, her arms crossed behind her, but she lifts her head toward the sky.
“You do not want to watch?” I ask, grateful that in her refusal to look, I can allow myself to do the same.
“I do not like to watch,” she says. And we walk away for a while, talking about the land and her family.
When we come back, the sheep has been strung up from the limb of a tree, the blood being let by gravity’s pull. And there is a pull for me too now, somehow, because I lift my camera and click a few more times, the shutter closing over the image of the sheep hanging there, a boy and his father beginning to skin it. The boy holds out the leg while his father begins cutting toward the body. The skin of the leg is folded back over one hoof.
And later I watch the meat, now pulled from the skinned creature, as it is chopped apart with a dull axe. And I stand behind the man who is working to chop the meat and photograph the severed head of the sheep, flies landing on its silent skull. Can I help myself? Is this in my blood, then, the American urge to aim, shoot, and capture?
The butchering takes time. It is a whole sheep, after all. And when it is done, I go to help with the cutting of dough into small pieces, which will be fried and come out hot and fresh. Borsok, they are called. I pop them into my mouth ceaselessly. Waiting for the meat to be prepared. This also takes time.
When at last the soup comes out, the other American and I sit at a table with the young woman and her six-year-old son. The soup is cloudy with bits of meat in it and has the strong smell and taste of heavy, gamy fat. I struggle to drink it, for the flavor is intense. I soak large chunks of bread in the soup to help get it down. I am told this is a rare thing to be prepared, and so I eat it. I try to eat it all.
“I am so tired of eating,” the other American says, stirring the soup. I say, “I don’t want to offend them.”
My stomach distends with the soup. I will be a good guest. I know what was sacrificed for this soup to be before me. If I do not finish it for the sake of my hosts, then I will finish it for the sake of that sheep.
After the meal, things quiet down. People are full and slower. Leftovers are packed in bags and Tupperware for us to take home.
Before we leave, the sisters ask that I take a picture of them with the matriarch. I agree, happily. It is something I can do for them, who have hosted me all day and allowed me to watch something that it turned out I did not need or want to watch.
I take several pictures of them all, posed before the house. They sit and stand on and around a bench below one of the windows. The five sisters frame the matriarch, whose gaze drifts to the side to watch a grandchild—a young boy, no more than two. He turns his back to the camera.
It is not until later that I look through these photos and see a reflection of myself in a window of the house. There I am, holding a camera that completely obscures my face, a ghost of a guest.